The Ghost and Mrs. Demure

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. That seems to be the credo that Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar lived by for his first American film "The Others". By taking healthy doses of "The Shining", "The Sixth Sense" and Alfred Hitchcock and mixing thoroughly, Mr. Amenábar creates a haunted house that is at once familiar and unique.

The film takes place entirely in a mansion on the Channel Islands in 1945 where Grace (Nicole Kidman) and her two children Anne and Nicholas (the precocious Akakina Mann and the believably naive James Bentley) live in complete darkness. In an inventive conceit, the film asserts that Anne and Nicholas are photo-sensitive and exposure to bright light could be fatal. This forces Grace to train her new nanny Mrs. Mills (the disconcertingly mild-mannered Fionnula Flanagan) that "no door must be opened until the previous one is closed". From this setup, which doesn't feel forced or convoluted in the film, the film begins its slow, stifling build during which more questions than doors are left open.

At the center of the film is a performance of unexpected complexity by Nicole Kidman. Ms. Kidman has always been a fine actress, but in "The Others" she takes everything you know about her and represses it. Only her flowing hair betrays the buttoned-down persona she so completely inhabits throughout the film. Fervently religious and violently obsessed with protecting her children, Mr. Kidman's performance is a study in nuanced unraveling. As she slowly comes to suspect there to be anything from burglars to Nazis in her huge secluded home, Ms. Kidman's Grace struggles to regain her composure as everything around seems to conspired against her.

Mr. Amenábar, who not only wrote and directed but also composed the score for the film, masterfully creates and atmosphere of suffocating repression. The scares in the film are the old fashioned kind, which are implied rather than shown. Thanks to his sparse music, sharp cast and writing which doles out information like a mathematical puzzle, Mr. Amenábar is able to keep the audience in suspense for much of the film. Only towards the end, by which point too many threads are left hanging for a neat and consistent finale, does he falter. But by that point it's worth hanging on to see where the film takes you.